The Akron Beacon Journal
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, an FBI unit failed to post the names of at least 20 known or suspected terrorists on a massive watch list that helps border and law enforcement agents keep al-Qaida operatives out of the country, government auditors reported Thursday.
Even a single omission of a suspected terrorist’s identity or other inaccuracy on the watch list, which contains 700,000 names, “can have enormous consequences,” warned the auditors from the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office.
The report was issued amid a flurry of renewed worries about terrorism as the 9/11 anniversary approaches:
Al-Qaida’s media arm announced that terror mastermind Osama bin Laden will release a new video in the coming days in what would be the first new images in nearly three years.
Congressional auditors gave a stinging assessment of the Homeland Security Department’s progress and said the department could not take credit for the absence of a terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Police in Germany searched Thursday for seven people thought to have aided three Islamic radicals arrested for allegedly plotting massive bombings that were thwarted by authorities.
The U.S. Embassy in Nigeria said American and other Western installations are at risk of attack there.
FBI — changes coming
Responding to the Justice Department’s report on shortcomings in the watch list, the director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center acknowledged the gap, but said it soon will be fixed.
The report also said 38 percent of a sample of 105 records from the watch list contained errors or inconsistencies that hadn’t been picked up in routine quality-assurance checks. The Terrorist Screening Center has compiled the watch list since 2003 from a dozen law enforcement and intelligence agency watch lists, so that all agencies can work with the same, complete list.
The audit, portions of which were classified, was a follow-up to a critical 2005 inspector general review of the effort, which found computer problems, names missing and inaccurate or inconsistent information. The earlier report urged a file-by-file review to ensure that the list is complete and accurate.
The consolidation into a single watch list is aimed at meeting a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, which criticized the CIA for identifying two of the suicide hijackers as suspected terrorists in late 2000, but failing to inform the Immigration and Naturalization Service until they’d already entered the United States. The two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.
Auditors credited the FBI for making considerable headway since 2005 to ensure the quality of the watch-list data and for setting up an office where people mistakenly listed can seek relief. But the auditors said problems continue, in part because the bureau is using two different “interconnected” versions of the watch-list database. They said routine quality-control efforts continue to overlook inaccuracies.
Mistakes in the data not only can prevent Border Patrol officers and others from identifying a terror suspect, but also could endanger the officers’ safety because they lack appropriate “handling instructions,” they wrote.
The auditors expressed concern that the screening center’s review of the accuracy of the watch list which as of April was growing by an average of 20,000 records per month could extend beyond year’s end, the bureau’s projected finish date.
In a response to the audit, Willie Hulon, the executive assistant FBI director who oversees the national security branch, said the bureau agrees with most of the auditors’ 18 recommendations for ensuring that a “thorough, current and accurate” list is available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He said he believes that the screening center “has improved the security of the homeland.”
Separately, the investigative arm of Congress was less certain about homeland security achievements in an audit presented to Congress.
“I don’t think we can take comfort in the fact, necessarily, that we haven’t had another attack,” Government Accountability Office Comptroller General David Walker told senators Thursday.
The Homeland Security Department’s primary mission is to prevent such a strike and to minimize the damage should an attack occur. Auditors said the United States is safer than it was that day in 2001, but the department has poorly managed its mission over the past four years.
In a 320-page report, the GAO identified 171 performance expectations and found the department achieved fewer than half since it formed four years ago. Experts, including auditors, have said it would take a department this large five to seven years to come together.
Agency disagrees
Homeland Security officials disagreed with many of the findings, which they said were based on vague and shifting criteria.
“The department continues to believe that they used a flawed methodology in preparing its report,” said Paul Schneider, the undersecretary for management.
Schneider said the measurements do not account for programs that never were expected to be completed in four years, such as a border security initiative. The department has deployed 6,000 National Guard members to the border and has added more than 5,000 border patrol agents since 2001.
Copyright 2007 Akron Beacon Journal